


the hunting

by stele3



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Animal Death, Gen, but if you need warnings, honestly, the less i tell you about this story the better, you can find them in the notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-04-18 06:13:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14206863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stele3/pseuds/stele3
Summary: @smilesguaranteed asked for...well. This.





	1. Chapter 1

Somewhere far to the north, under a sky lit by iridescent flares refracted through the atmosphere, an elk buck moves slowly across a clearing. Its hooves sink deep into fresh snowfall and it staggers along, pulling each leg free with difficulty before taking the next step. It encounters a break in the snow, where something smaller than itself cut a path perpendicular to its own, and pauses to sniff at the red droplets scattered in the creature’s wake. Fortunately for whatever desperate animal fled this way, elk are generally not carnivorous—though exception have undoubtedly been made—and the buck continues on its way.

From approximately one hundred and twenty meters above and to the southwest, a scope tracks the buck’s progress across the clearing. The scope is mounted on a high-powered rifle, which is loaded with an armor-piercing round in the chamber.

Fortunately for the buck, the creature with one finger curled over the trigger, while technically omnivorous, has no interest in hunting elk today.

It is 0449 hours, but at this longitude, darkness still blankets the world. That does not matter to the Soldier. The nightvision goggles in his pack have proven unnecessary, as the aurora overhead is more than sufficient illumination for his enhanced eyesight.

His quarry cannot have gone far, not with a bullet through the thigh, but there’s a significant stretch of open ground between the Soldier and the treeline. He waits until the elk has long since passed before dropping from the cliffside, his skis cutting smooth lines down the slope.

The man he is chasing—the man who he _shot_ —had made a less graceful decent: after taking a bullet to the leg at close range, he had turned and made a staggering leap off the ridge.

As the Soldier descends the slope, the cold air whistling past his covered ears, he considers the fact that neither the bullet nor the fight that preceded the bullet, nor the fall that followed, had been sufficient to kill his target. Likely this indicates the presence of biological enhancements, perhaps similar to the Soldier’s own. Admittedly the target had thick snow cover to break his fall but the distance still would have killed an ordinary human being.

Instead the target had lain still for only a few minutes before climbing back to his feet and fighting his way through the snow towards the treeline. Another bullet to the back could have killed him—and yet the Soldier’s finger had hesitated on the trigger.

The orders from HYDRA had been simple: _contain immediately for extraction, lethal damage authorized_. And yet…the instructions are not to kill outright. The Soldier prefers to avoid unnecessary bloodshed whenever possible.

He thinks he has exercised that preference before and been punished for doing so. He does not remember when, but this does not trouble him much.

-o-

The trail leads approximately two klicks into the forest, then encounters a half-frozen creek and ends. The wounded man’s tracks lead into the water but do not emerge on the far bank.

Dropping into a crouch, the Soldier listens carefully to the forest. Except for the elk, little else moves through the cold half-light. Even under the canopy of trees, the aurora casts strange light on the thick snow, which muffles audible signals in all directions. The creek is approximately three meters across and moves sluggishly, strewn with ice floes that give no indication in which direction the target traveled. Upstream leads toward a jagged promontory of volcanic rock, some ancient, blackened upheaval that juts out of the trees into the sky, maybe a thousand meters in height; downstream the creek winds through the trees, with too many bends for long-range visibility.

Swinging the M82 onto his back, the Soldier adjusts the straps of his protective gauntlets, checks that his stun batons are readily accessible, and pulls a sidearm. The wrist monitor reads approximately negative seven degrees, but the briefing had suggested colder air will move into the area by tonight. He needs to find and extract the target before then.

He reexamines the creek and the trail leading into it. The target’s lopsided tracks have improved; likely his leg has already begun to heal. He will be faster and harder to track now. His steps going into the water do not pivot or provide any other clue as to which direction he turned, and so the Soldier considers both directions carefully. If the target had the same access to weather reports or simply had superior nature survival skills, he would likely turn towards the rocky promontory and seek shelter. If he wanted to lose the Soldier quickly, he might go with the current of the stream.

Considering the target’s past actions—racing headlong into a frozen wasteland with little to no supplies and minimal weaponry before leaping off a cliff—he seems intent on escaping the Soldier at all costs. With that in mind, the Soldier rises and begins to move downstream.

The faintest sound of displaced air from above is the only warning he gets before something heavy slams into his back.

As he goes to the ground, the Soldier has enough time to register surprise. In this environment, his hearing is sharp enough to pick up human breathing within a few meters; the target must have been holding his breath this entire time, a not-insignificant feat, all while gripping a tree trunk.

That brief moment is all the opportunity for reflection the Soldier gets. Then he is fighting for his life.

The target goes right for his stun batons, yanking one free before the Soldier can flip them over. Instead of immediately using it, however, the target swiftly disengages; there’s a klick and a shift and when the Soldier rolls away the barrel of the M82 has been removed.

The soft layer of snow underneath them limits the precision of their movements. The Soldier swings to his feet instead of kipping and fires three rounds into center mass. They are blocked by—by the target’s hand?

What?

Again, there is no time to evaluate this intelligence: the target moves to close quarters, knocking away the Soldier’s firearm and striking him in the chest with the stun baton. The Soldier’s muscles briefly go rigid as several thousand volts of electricity course through him, but then he is bringing his fist down on the target’s elbow and disengaging the baton before throwing a roundhouse punch.

He misses.

The target is fast, almost a blur as he dodges underneath the swing, landing jabs to the Soldier’s abdomen. Fortunately, the Soldier wears reinforced body armor, but the hits land harder than they should. Spinning to the side, he catches the target’s next attempt with the baton and twists his wrist backward; something crunches and the weapon drops, leaving a baton-shaped crater in the snow.

Either cold has numbed the target’s nerve receptors or his pain threshold is much higher than any opponent the Soldier has ever faced, because the broken hand barely slows him down. He drives a knee into the Soldier’s ribcage, headbutts him in the cheekbone, strikes at his throat, and tries to rip one of the Soldier’s backup sidearms from his side.

Bringing his elbow down to trap the groping hand against his side—and noting that it’s much harder than it should be—the Soldier headbutts the target one, two, three times. It’s enough to stun him, finally, and the Soldier places him in a headlock, applying pressure to the carotid arteries on either side of the target’s neck while leaving his airway clear.

He tries to go to the ground to get his legs wrapped around the target’s torso—the better to increase pressure on the lungs—but the target heaves him up with an impressive display of core strength and slams the Soldier into a tree trunk, hard enough that wood splinters.

The Soldier’s muscles tighten, fingers digging into the target’s jaw—but he does not pull it sideways. The break would be clean, a swift and nearly painless death. The Soldier’s specialty. He has killed so many people in this Cold War of shadows, most with perfect shots through the skull that splatter brains like exploded grapefruits and leave not even a second for neural impulses to register the pain of a bullet breaking the skin.

This would be nearly as humane, and yet instead he shoves away from the tree, leaps up to wrap his legs around the target’s ribs, and jackknifes his body to fling the target face down on the ground, the Soldier’s arms still wrapped around his neck.

There is no sound in the snowy forest except for the target’s choked grunts. Eventually those, too, fade.

-o-

With the target rendered unconscious, the Soldier moves quickly to bind his arms and legs together. Given the level of strength the target has already displayed, the Soldier doubts they will actually do anything to restrain him; but it’ll slow him down, and hopefully give the Soldier enough warning to apply countermeasures.  

That, of course, opens up the issue of how to move the target in this state. Carrying him is out of the question. Given that he possesses all the long-range weaponry, the Soldier wants as much space between them as he can manage. An answer presents itself in the Soldier’s collapsible skies: with some rope and a few sturdy branches, they form a sled onto which the Soldier places the target, tying his legs to the wood for good measure.

With that task accomplished, he takes stock of his weaponry. The M82’s barrel has been bent; he discards it with a scowl. He wasted a whole clip of ammunition for his sidearm, but he manages to retrieve the stun baton from the snow drift into which it had disappeared. None of the rest of his gear appears to have been damaged in the attack or the struggle that followed.

Somewhat mollified, he examines his target by the faintest glow of morning.

The briefing had been…thin. Something had happened recently at the base, an attack that left systems damaged and far too many personnel on the ground. Normal deployment protocols were not observed. The Soldier’s handler had identified this man as the perpetrator of the attack and given his last-known coordinates—heading due East from the base, likely on snow mobile—before setting the Soldier loose with his gear and a small support team.

They had pursued the target towards the eastern ridge, across flat, snow-covered terrain. The Soldier had moved into point, expecting the target to attack him; but instead the return fire had struck his support team, killing or injuring most of them and causing the few remaining non-casualties to fall back at the Soldier’s order. Likely he would be punished for that, as well, but it was painfully clear that they would only wind up as collateral damage in this fight.

The Soldier does not have any emotional attachment to members of the support team: base personnel rotate frequently in an effort to minimize the possibility of any one person knowing too much. But he dislikes to waste the lives of personnel needlessly.

Thus, only the Soldier had pressed on, pursuing on snowmobile to the base of the ridge, then on foot up the craggy slopes. It was a two-day chase with no rest, at a pace impossible to maintain by someone who didn’t have biological enhancements.

The Soldier tries not to think poorly of his handler, but even the most basic briefing should have mentioned _that_ and oh yeah.

He tugs off the man’s left glove. Metal arm.

The rest of the target appears to be standard-issue. He is a Caucasian male in his late 20’s, with unkempt brown hair, approximately ninety-five kilos—a lot of which likely comes from the arm. He wears tactical gear similar to the Soldier’s but appears to have run out of ammo and cast aside his weapons in his flight. He has no hidden weaponry—no _more_ hidden weaponry, anyway: last night he pulled two unexpected knives and threw them at the Soldier’s head during their confrontation on the ridge—and he has no apparent tracking devices on his clothes or embedded in his skin. Still, it seems unlikely that he attacked a covert, remote HYDRA base alone without backup or an extraction plan of his own.

As he completes his examination of the target, the Soldier carefully and strategically breaks the target’s leg.

The target wakes with a yelp of pain and the Soldier dodges a flailing arm. He is not fast enough and the target’s fist connects with his jaw; the Soldier’s head snaps back.

They wrestle in the snow, trading fast blows at close quarters. Every time the Soldier tries to get up and put some space between them he finds his legs swept out from under him. The mounting frustration drives from his mouth an uncharacteristic shout: “Stop _fighting_ me!”

The sound of his voice cracks through the forest, impossibly loud in the stillness.

“Fuck you,” the target spits, equally as startling, and bites the Soldier on the jaw. The only reason it isn’t in the throat is that the Soldier, perceiving the threat in time, scrunches his head and shoulder together to cut off that avenue of attack.

Snarling, he leans forward and puts his full weight on the target, pressing down into his ribcage. Blood trickles down his neck, dripping onto the target’s face as he clenches his teeth with grim determination, refusing to let go even as his breath wheezes in and out.

“I can do this all day,” the Soldier warns calmly, even as he feels the skin of his jaw tear.

The body underneath his flutters with stifled movements, struggling and failing against the Soldier’s weight. There isn’t much difference in their sizes and clearly their skill level is also similar, but the target has been weakened by injury, lack of sleep, and poor nutritional intake. It doesn’t take long before lack of oxygen causes the teeth clenched painfully on the Soldier’s jaw to release, mouth opening wide to suck at oxygen, choking and coughing on blood.

For a moment the Soldier considers whether to maintain position—to let the coughs turn to gurgles and then to silence. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s killed: he is a soldier, he has long ago forgotten how many lives he’s taken. For a moment they pile up in his head—he cannot remember faces or names or _why_ —there are too many.

This man’s death was authorized in the briefing. He attacked the base, killing many of the Soldier’s fellows. Letting his breath stutter to a halt would be _just_. Given the amount of trouble he’s already caused the Soldier, it would certainly be easier to retrieve a body than a man who has already proven himself determined to fight to the death.

The moment passes and the Soldier eases back, then scrambles to his feet, backing out of range and drawing his sidearm. On the ground, the target heaves in oxygen desperately. Bright red blood slicks his mouth and the Soldier absently presses a hand to his jaw, barely even feeling the injury in the cold air.

His target’s death may be just and convenient, but it is not _necessary_. The Soldier does not kill when unnecessary, when the parameters of the mission allow for mercy.

Re-holstering his sidearm, the Soldier heaves his rucksack onto his back then bends and, taking hold of the rope he’s attached to the bottom of the makeshift sled, begins to drag it and his target through the snow.

-o-

It’s only two klicks back through the forest to the clearing, but their path is littered with trees and uneven terrain. By the time they emerge from the treeline, the sun has risen over the horizon and lit the snowy landscape up like one giant mirror, reflecting into the Soldier’s eyes. He squints against the brightness and huffs along, occasionally turning his head to check out of the corner of his eye that his target is still prone on the sled and not sharpening a captured stick to plunge in the Soldier’s ass.

No attack presents itself. The Soldier can’t tell if his target is conscious or not, but in either case, he doesn’t appear to move through their entire trek.

Once they are half a klick from the treeline—far enough for aerial transport to retrieve them safely—the Soldier finally stops. Sweat has crystallized on his eyebrows and he swipes it off, giving one last wary glance at the target before he steps away, digging through his pack as he does.

The beacon is small and perfectly designed to fit in his pack. The Soldier appreciates everything about its creation.

Activating the beacon, the Soldier places it approximately ten meters away from their location then trudges back through the snow. It’s at least a meter deep in places and he keeps having to drag his legs up and out of the holes they form with each step. More than once he thinks he’s going to lose a boot.

The sled has formed a kind of shallow foxhole, in which he can see the top of the target’s head. He’s sitting up, watching the Soldier awkwardly shuffle through the snow. The shock appears to have worn off and the target examines the Soldier with interest.

The Soldier approaches warily, not discounting the possibility that the target secreted a knife or other weapon away. When he drops down into the foxhole, however, the target says nothing. Just continues his silent perusal. There’s still blood around his mouth.

Swinging his Scorpion onto his back, the Soldier unzips a chest pocket and removes an energy bar, tossing it to his target. Instead of catching it, though, the target lets it bounce off his shoulder into the snow.

The Soldier scowls. “Might not want to waste that. It could be the last meal you get for a while. You really did a number on the base, I’d be surprised if we even have the reserves to feed the likes of you.”

Still, the target does not speak. They sit in silence while the sun moves steadily higher in the sky. Their breath catches the sunlight in plumes of gold before disappearing. The steam from their bodies is slower to rise, turning white like spiderwebs that surround them.

Finally the target says, “You’re not here to kill me.”

Upward inflection indicates question, or at least the presence of uncertainty. It is not an order, so the Soldier ignores him.

“Did HYDRA send you?” the target asks. It’s much more clearly a question, this time. “Who are you?”

The Soldier shifts in place slightly to keep the blood in his legs circulating. “You’re my mission.”

“I’m not going back,” the target says. Widening eyes indicate fear. “I’d rather die. Kill me or I’m going to try to kill you again.”

 _Lethal damage authorized_. The Soldier watches the perimeter and says nothing.

There is silence for a while. And then: “You could let me go.”

The Soldier frowns. The idea is absurd. Let the target go? Let him escape into the unknown? He has already created an enormous amount of havoc already, the possibility of releasing him presents nothing but chaos in the Soldier’s mental actuary tables.

The target’s death is not necessary, so long as the extraction team comes soon.

-o-

The extraction team does not come.

The Soldier waits until nearly sundown. The monitor on his wrist tells him it is already negative eighteen degrees; even for him, certain levels of temperature must not be survivable, though he is not entirely sure on that point. He thinks he remembers being colder than this at some point, and he clearly survived.

The target, however, is in poor condition. He has lost blood and the shock of his broken leg does not help matters. Despite his earlier request for execution, he is now huddled in on himself, shivering and clearly trying to conserve body heat. When the Soldier begins dragging the sled again, he groans loudly but says nothing.

The Soldier’s legs are stiff with the cold. He grits his teeth, forcing uncooperative fingers to close around the rope and drag the target back to the cover of trees.

Above them, a vast array of unfeeling stars gaze down, indifferent to the struggle of these two small figures in the snow.

Reaching the trees, the Soldier carefully selects a tree well, one deep enough to all but hide them from the outside but not tapered enough to trap them. Some digging is required and a spade is not packed in with his gear, so he resorts to scooping the snow out in handfuls.

Seated on the sled, the target watches in silence. The Soldier would believe that the man has already died, frozen upright, except for the faint puffs of breath visible in the moonlight.

When finally there is enough space under the tree branches, the Soldier drags the sled into their makeshift den. Once inside, he quickly makes to untie the target. “You can run if you want. You’ll freeze to death before you get five klicks. Or you can let me tie your hands and put you in a s-survival bag.”

The target’s long hair hangs in his face. Even with enhanced vision, the Soldier can’t see his expression well enough to guess what he’s feeling, but after a moment of silence—and it is suddenly very quiet underneath the branches, surrounded on all sides by snow—the target holds out his hands.

By the time the Soldier gets the target’s hands bound and helps him into the survival bag, it’s reached negative twenty-two and the Soldier’s own functions have diminished noticeably. He should go back out and attempt to cover their tracks in case the target was escaping toward a rendezvous with allies, but it takes all of his remaining strength to break the heater sticks and stuff them down to the bottom of the bag before climbing inside.

The target, who had appeared to be falling asleep, jolts awake. “W-what’re y’doin’?”

“Only one b-b-bag,” the Soldier hisses, easing in against the target’s back. It’s uncomfortable being this close to someone who has demonstrated enhanced physical capacities of his own, but it’s necessary.

He drags the tarp over them both. It crinkles loudly then settles, closing off the world so that the only sound is their breath and chattering teeth.

They lie with their bodies stiff against one another. At the bottom of the bag, the heat sticks kick in and the Soldier can’t help a faint noise of pain as sensation returns to his toes. Fumbling, he breaks another and stuffs it between him and the target.

The target groans, squirming as if to turn around. Quickly the Soldier grabs his throat. “Don’t try anything.”

Against his palm, the target’s pulse is sluggish, his breathing labored. “My hand. C-can’t move my f-f-fingers.”

The Soldier hesitates, calculating. They only have six heat-sticks; it’d be stupid to waste one making this man more comfortable.

Still, there had been actual pain in his voice, mixed with an animal fear. The Soldier thinks about the metal hand, how the target may have lost it—what level of pain he must be experiencing now to actually let it show. Frostbite can turn necrotic, and though that isn’t a concern for the Soldier, he can’t be sure that the target’s enhancements are similarly efficient at healing.

Squirming a hand between their bodies—which makes the target twitch again—the Soldier digs out the heat-stick and brings it around the target’s body to his front, pressing it against his belly. In doing so, he pulls their bodies flush, knees tucked to knees and his chest against the target’s back.

They’re still separated by layers of clothing but it’s as close to another person as the Soldier can ever remember being outside of combat. There have been technicians, of course, and doctors to repair those injuries severe enough that the Soldier’s healing factor couldn’t be relied upon to repair before they became terminal; most had worn gloves and touched him only as much as necessary.

The target isn’t touching him, of course; his hands are bound in front of him. But the Soldier has one arm around him and the other awkwardly stuffed between them against his back, and he can feel the heat of his own breath rebounding from the target’s hair, only inches from the Soldier’s face.

Earlier today, they’d been this close but nowhere near this still. The wound on the Soldier’s jaw itches with fresh scabs, still healing. It could have been his neck.

Here in the dark, tucked underneath the tarp and zipped into the survival bag together, the bodies that they turned against one another so viciously are now the only thing keeping each other alive. The Soldier thinks that he must be close enough to _feel_ the target thinking, calculating the degree of windchill and his own injuries, and realizing that not all the heat sticks in the world will save him if he kills the Soldier, or tries to escape on his own. A cooling body has no warmth to share.

The target shifts slightly and his hand brushes against the Soldier’s fingers where they both grip the heat stick. The Soldier braces for an attack, maybe an attempt to apply pressure points—there are spots on the hand more sensitive than almost anywhere else on the human body; they are especially useful for subduing a foe with minimal damage—but nothing happens. The target is merely cupping his cold hands around the heat stick, held close against his own vulnerable abdomen.

“Are you American?” the target murmurs.

Perhaps it’s the cold, or the soporific effects of the heat, or the exhaustion of a long day spent tracking and then battling the man held against his chest, but the non-sequitur catches the Soldier completely off guard. “What?”

The target turns his head very slightly. It is too dark inside the survival bag to see anything, even with enhanced vision, but the Soldier is close enough to detect the movement. “You speak English with an American accent. Are you American?”

The Soldier blinks. There is no difference between the dark of their shelter and the backs of his eyelids. He speaks American-accented English the same way he speaks German with a West Berlin accent, or Hebrew by way of Poland: instinctively, and with no recollection of ever having learned the language or dialect, and in reaction to some hidden cues in his surroundings or conversational partner that indicate what would be most natural and unobtrusive thing to come out of his mouth.

“Aren’t you?” He immediately regrets asking; despite their current symbiotic predicament, the target has every reason to lie to him, and asking any question at all betrays his lack of a sufficient briefing. He can think of nothing else, however, that would have prompted him to speak in English—and he _did_ speak first, didn’t he? The target might very well have copied _him_.

But all the target says is, “They only ever speak to me in Russian.”

The Soldier waits, but apparently there is nothing else to the thought.

He lies very, very still and the target lies very, very still, and at some point, the Soldier falls asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for some period-typical racial language.

A branching network of structures within the human brain forms the limbic system. It is not a separate network from the rest of the brain but operates on a more enigmatic level than conscious thought or actions. It modulates many different functions related to emotions, automatic behavior, and long-term memory access, usually via the application or reduction of dopamine hormones in the bloodstream.

The stimuli most likely to trigger a response in the limbic system is the sense of smell.

It is exactly that stimuli which first penetrates the Soldier’s groggy mind: a particular blend of pheromones, sweat, and skin that filters lightning-quick through a dozen receptors and neural pathway. In his half-awake state, it gives him a purely caveman response of _that smells good I want more of it._ He turns his head, instinctively pushing his nose closer to the source of that smell.

The sharp prickle of beard rubs against his nose and he jerks back.

Behind him, the hunter jolts awake, his arm tightening around the Soldier’s waist.

They are still underneath the tarp, tucked in the survival bag together. The smell of the hunter’s body is thick in the air around the Soldier. Judging from the weight of the tarp, some snow fell on them in the night; when the Soldier reaches up to rip it away, the morning sun reflects so brightly off the fresh snow that it hurts his eyes.

A hand clamps around his throat.

“Don’t,” says the hunter. He’s not squeezing enough to cut off the Soldier’s oxygen. Just enough to hold him still. “I don’t want to hurt you again, we’ll make better time if you aren’t slowing me down. But if you’re going to fight me or try to run, I’ll re-break your leg.”

They hang there a moment, the hunter gripping the Soldier’s throat and the Soldier’s metal hand gripping the hunter’s wrist. Below the waist, their legs are still tangled together in the survival bag, warm and surprisingly comfortable. Part of the Soldier wants to lie back down and pull the tarp over them again.

Slowly he peels his fingers away. The metal servos whir as he does so, the only sound in this winter landscape except for their breathing and the crinkle of the tarp.

The hunter removes his hand, too, slowly. He gets out of the survival bag. Most of his gear is on the other side of him—which, the Soldier wishes to fuck he’d noticed that last night. Now it’s too late: his broken leg is still re-healing, and the leg that was shot is less then 100%. He can’t run fast enough to escape this man, and even if he could, it’s now clear to him that they are nowhere near civilization.

When he’d first escaped from the base, he’d only thought to get away, quickly. There had not been room for anything else in his mind, full of static and screaming, the adrenaline bolt of an animal burst free. He hadn’t cared if he lived or died, so long as he didn’t go _back_.

But now—now the hunter warily extends another energy bar and the canteen, and the Soldier takes them both.

As they eat, the Soldier evaluates their situation. The base must have been even more disrupted than even he realized: either the hunter’s beacon is transmitting on a dead channel, or all the airborne vehicles were too damaged to fly.

Or maybe this is a test. The Soldier knows he’s faced many tests before, of his physical and mental capabilities as well as his loyalty. But maybe this time _he_ is not the one being tested.

Squinting against the sunlight, he examines the hunter. He is a tall, Caucasian man with absurdly broad shoulders and fair coloring. English descent, maybe, or Irish. His beard is a slightly darker color than his hair.

“What’s your name?” the Soldier asks.

The hunter had been staring out into the woods with narrowed eyes. He looks over with obvious surprise. “What?”

“Your name.”

A muscle jumps in the hunter’s jaw and he looks away. It’s a pretty strong jaw. The Soldier can still see an imprint of his own teeth on the left side. Untreated infection might be one of the few things able to kill the Soldier, and human bites have a high potential for transmitting bacteria.

The Soldier has seen a monitor on the hunter’s wrist, displaying the current temperature. The sky above is perfectly clear, blue in all directions, but the sun has already started to set. With no cloud cover to trap heat, the night will be that much colder, far below what is survivable even for someone with enhancements. The Soldier thinks about that level of cold and shudders; he has experienced it before, maybe. He does not remember.

The makeshift sled sits nearby. Whichever way this shakes out, the Soldier is _not_ going back on that thing.

“We need shelter,” he says.

The hunter breaks from his contemplation of the surrounding forest and looks at the Soldier with narrowed eyes. “Decided to be friendly, huh?”

Now it’s the Soldier’s turn to grit his teeth. He imagines sinking them into the hunter’s skin again; imagines breaking his neck, punching his face again and again until it’s nothing but pulp.

“There’s elevation to the southwest,” he says, jerking his chin in that direction. “Might be able to find a cave or something.”

“Yeah? You got friends waiting for us there?”

“If I had, I would already have signaled to them and you’d be dead.”

They finish their energy bars in silence, eyeing one another.

A soft beep. The hunter automatically turns his wrist over, looking at the square readout there. He makes a face. He’s surprisingly expressive, for a HYDRA operative. The Soldier wonders why he isn’t wearing a mask; the technicians usually put _him_ in a mask, unless they want someone to see his face. Why they would want someone to see his face, the Soldier doesn’t know. He thinks it’s happened more than once, but the only time he can remember was the most recent mission.

_Sergeant Barnes?_

“Hey!”

The Soldier twitches. The image in his head—a man on the ground, staring up at him—slips sideways, replaced by a man on the ground, staring at him. “What?”

“I asked you a question. Why did you go in this direction from the base?”

Why? The Soldier can barely remember his escape from the base, much less any decision-making processes that might have happened during that time. He shakes his head, though he doesn’t mean it as an answer.

The hunter clearly takes it that way and scowls. “We don’t have time for this. Weather forecast says we’ve got temperatures of sixty below tonight, and we’ve already burned three hours of daylight. Neither of us will make it far enough before nightfall to survive on our own, so if you’ve got a stash of equipment that you were trying to reach, then now’s the time to let me know.”

“I don’t have anything.” All he’s got is what he was wearing when he left the base, which wasn’t much: his last mission had sent him to a much warmer climate, and the technicians had actually been in the process of removing his gear for cold storage protocols when something inside him had just…snapped. After that he hadn’t had the presence of mind to grab anything except weapons that he could immediately use on whoever was standing in his way.

It’s clear that he’s not believed, but the hunter merely scowls and tucks his empty energy bar wrapper into his suit, then stands. “Can you walk?”

“Sure.” The Soldier tosses his bar wrapper aside, mostly to see what response he gets.

The hunter does not disappoint: he circles around to the side in order to pick up the wrapper, glaring the whole way.

“You gonna lecture me about littering?” the Soldier asks.

“No,” the hunter growls as he tucks that wrapper in with his. “Just wondering if you’re hoping to leave a trail for someone.”

“You’re the one who left a tracking beacon in the field.”

As he shoulders the pack, the hunter grumbles, “Shoulda shot you when I had the chance.”

 _You still might,_ the Soldier thinks, but does not say. He’s not going back. If he gets a hand on a gun, _one_ of them is going to die.

-o-

Their journey back through the woods is slow and—for the Soldier—exceptionally painful. His legs, one shot and one broken, both aches with healing muscles. He shouldn’t be walking yet but he’s not letting himself be dragged like a dead prize animal. He has to use one of the hunter’s collapsible skis as a crutch to propel himself forward.

The hunter keeps his distance, walking a few meters away on the Soldier’s right side and not seeming impatient with the slow pace. Now that he’s walking upright, the Soldier makes one sidearm, those stun batons, and a knife in his boot. Likely a few more weapons in his pack, but not many. The survival gear takes up too much space.

At least there’s plenty of snow. Anytime they’re thirsty they can grab a handful. Then there’s the creek, cold but clear in the winter. The hunter pauses to fill up his canteen before they turn upstream.

The silence between them as they travel is strangely companionable, considering that only a few hours ago they were trying to kill each other. Likely will again before all this is over.

Every second of cooperation that the Soldier offers is another second in which he has time to heal. He’s clearly no match for the hunter half-injured; he needs to be as close to full strength as possible before he makes another attempt. So he will be complacent and cooperative, and he will wait to burst free again.

“You know,” the hunter says, and it startles the Soldier all over again to hear his voice. There’s something different about it—not just that he’s speaking English with an American accent, but the _way_ he talks; the technicians, handlers, and support team rarely speak to the soldier but when they do, it is almost always in commands. There’s no… _conversation_.

But the hunter says, “I’m having a hard time figuring this out. Either you’re a lone operative, or your superiors sent you on a suicide mission with no backup. If it’s the former then you’re insane to take on a HYDRA base solo, let alone insanely _lucky_ to have found it in the first place. If it’s the latter, then they’ve abandoned a highly-skilled operative in the field and don’t deserve your loyalty. Care to enlighten me?”

The Soldier remains silent, struggling through the snow. After a moment the hunter continues, “Then there’s the fact that my handler authorized lethal parameters…but he didn’t _order_ your death. Now, I count seven, maybe eight bodies that you put on the ground, maybe a helluva lot more. I’ve killed better men for far less.”

That gets the Soldier to pause and glance over. The hunter meets his gaze, tightening that jaw again. “So why didn’t you?” the Soldier asks.

“Because something here doesn’t add up. You’re enhanced, you’re skilled, you destroyed half an entire base on your own. You’re a level eight threat, at least. I should know who you are, but I don’t. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try again.” The hunter takes a few steps towards him, his gaze hard. He doesn’t have a weapon drawn but he’s fast enough to pull a sidearm even at this range. “Who are you?”

The Soldier’s mouth feels dry. He wants to scoop up snow but can’t make himself look away from the potential threat. Instead he turns and resumes walking, and after a moment the hunter follows.

Who is he? He’s the Soldier, the Fist of HYDRA, the asset. He doesn’t have an identity beyond that. No one has ever called him by a name. Except…

“I had a mission,” the Soldier says. He can feel it pulsing inside of him, still. He isn’t meant to be here, he was supposed to go back to base. He did, but somehow, something had gone sideways from one step to the next—a glitch in his programming. He’d slid into that gap, and on the other side had been bloody, frenzied freedom. “Lethal parameters. Two targets, level four. Kill and extract. A scientist, and his wife. But the scientist—he called me something. A name.”

“Wait,” the hunter says. “You’re HYDRA?”

The world flickers slightly and the Soldier says, “Hail HYDRA.”

Then it flickers again and he sucks in a breath. “No. _No_. Fuck HYDRA.”

The hunter stiffens, his back straight. “So you’re a traitor.”

“I don’t.” The Soldier twitches, putting a hand to his head. The static is back. “I don’t know. I’m not—I’m not going back. I won’t go back to them.”

The hunter looks comically offended by this announcement. Not for the first time, the Soldier wonders if he is alone. If the things he half-remembers—pain, cold, muscles locking under the influence of electricity—happen only to him. Whether they happened at all.

The static is building. He feels nauseous, suddenly, and spins to vomit in the snow. All that comes up is water and half-digested bits of energy bar.

The pressure in his head builds. Something jolts and he drops to his knees. It feels like the electricity, running through him, like he’s in the—the chair.

Jolt.

Jolt.

He can feel hands on him and he lashes out, or tries to. His arms won’t work. They’re—

Strapped down—

Frozen—

Jolt.

Jolt.

His lungs won’t expand. The inside of his head is empty, lifeless, a doll held in the grasp of an angry child and _shook_.

Sensation returns slowly, registering pins and needles, a nerve-like buzzing in his face. There’s drool on his mouth, or more vomit.

“Easy,” the hunter is saying behind him. He’s got one arm looped around the Soldier’s midsection, holding him up from simply falling face first into the snow. “Easy.”

He pulls the Soldier back to lean against a tree, offers him the canteen. His eyes, when the Soldier can finally squint enough against the too-bright sunlight to see, look genuinely concerned.

“I had a name,” the Soldier gasps. His lips feel slightly numb.

“Yeah? What is it?” The hunter is pulling off his outermost jacket to sling it around the Soldier, who realizes he’s trembling badly.

“I don’t remember.” The Soldier swallows, wiping at his mouth. “What…what’s your name?”

Another strange expression crosses the hunter’s face. Thus far he’s projected an aura of confidence and competence, even when faced with the possibility of being abandoned to freeze to death in the wilderness by his _own_ superiors; but for the first time, he seems…uncertain.

Stepping away, he glances around. “We’ve gotta keep moving. You need me to carry you?”

 _He doesn’t know_ , the Soldier thinks. He pushes his arms into the jacket, relishing its warmth. Doesn’t feel like there’s any hidden weapons or tools in the pockets or lining. Too bad.

Straightening away from the tree, he wipes his mouth again and resumes their slow trek south. After a moment the hunter follows.

They travel in silence. There are no more questions.

-o-

As they near the promontory they encounter their first bit of good luck: an overhang that somewhat shelters the trees in its shadow. The air is colder without even the weak sun—it’s long since clouded over—but the wood of the trees will be relatively dry.

The Soldier’s abdomen registers gnawing discomfort, the result of three days with minimal nutrition accompanied by physical exertion, injury, and the kind of cold that burns calories to stay warm. Vomiting up the energy bar earlier didn’t help.

“Don’t suppose _you’ve_ got a hidden stash somewhere out here?” he asks the hunter as they roam in the shadows of the rock. He’s started to shiver, from the cold and from exhaustion. His legs have started to itch, the hot prickle of healing fascia.

“Actually, I do.” The hunter glances away from his examination of the rocky surface above them, shooting the Soldier a wry look. “Don’t get too excited, it isn’t much. Won’t do us any good if we don’t find—there.”

He stops, at the Soldier follows his gaze. About twenty feet up and to the right, there’s a dark slit in the surface of the rock, where the volcanic layer cracked and formed a narrow opening.

Climbing up to the cave takes the last of the Soldier’s strength. Neither of his legs want to bend, as the fresh scar tissue has stiffened in the gathering cold. He grits his teeth and digs his metal fingers into the surface of the rock, dragging himself up inch by painful inch.

The hunter, of course, practically springs up the climb like a fucking goat. He even turns back to offer a hand up, which the Soldier ignores. “Fine, have it your way,” the hunter grumbles, like he isn’t the goddamned reason why the Soldier is struggling to move in the first place.

The inside of the cave isn’t much warmer than outside, but it’s protected from the wind and at least it’s mostly dry. The Soldier’s feet have been wet for three days. He gratefully slumps to the floor of the cave with his back to one rocky wall and his aching legs stretched out in front of him.

The hunter is more cautious, shining a light deeper into the cavern as if he’s honestly waiting for a surprise attack. When none presents itself, he finally moves to shift the pack off his shoulders and promptly begins unzipping it, removing the survival pack, canteen, tarp, and other items.

The Soldier itches to grab at the equipment; they’re the only reason he’s cooperating, after all, as he can’t exactly survive out here without them. But right now, he’s too exhausted to move, three days of overexertion slamming into him the moments he’s down. He doesn’t even have the strength to push his hair out of his face. It’s…long. Why is it long? He thinks the last time he noticed, it was just starting to get in his eyes; now it’s halfway across his face and sticking to his damp skin.

Outside the cave mouth, it’s started to snow. The Soldier watches as fat flakes drift down onto the trees in the distance. Closer to them, the branches are bare and stripped of needles; it looks like there was a fire here, at some point in the last few years, and the trees closest to them are blackened by its memory.  

The sound of ripping fabric draws his attention back to the hunter. He’s tearing at the inside of his pack. “What’re you doin’?”

The hunter glances up at him, his face shadowed by the dark of the cave, and resumes tearing. “On a mission in…somewhere remote, I lost contact with my support team. Was alone in the desert for a week with no rations before they found me, and I burned through ten kilos of body weight. Ever since then I’ve kept an emergency meal pouch hidden in the lining of my gear.”

Sure enough, he tears open the lining of the pack to reveal a field ration kit, broken down into separate components that tumble free onto the cave floor. The Soldier says, “They’d punish you. Unauthorized equipment.”

“That’s why it’s _hidden_ ,” the hunter replies in the kind of voice that makes the Soldier regret not punching him more when he had the chance.

He feels a little better once the little chemical tablet gets dropped in a pouch with some water and starts to heat up. The fumes it emits prevents them from placing it directly inside the survival bag—neither one of them wants to gas themselves—but the hunter builds a small tent, draping the bag over the top of the hissing meal pouch, in order to conserve as much energy as possible.

While it heats, they share the small baggie of mixed nuts and berries. The hunter is surprisingly fair with the portions: he carefully measures out half to both of them. If he wasn’t currently on a mission to return the Soldier to HYDRA and the hell he’s trying to escape, he’d almost be likable.

Maybe…maybe the Soldier can use that. Maybe he can play to the hunter’s sympathies, convince him to let the Soldier go.

Once he’s eaten his half, the hunter stands, swinging the much-smaller pack onto one shoulder. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t eat all of the meal while I’m gone.”

“What?” Something flares underneath the Soldier’s breastbone. It’s the same feeling he gets when he sees the chair. “Where are you going?”

“To get firewood.” The hunter pauses, his head cocked to one side, looking down at the Soldier. “Don’t worry, I won’t be long.”

Worry? Is that what he’s feeling right now? Why? Once the hunter leaves, it’s just the Soldier in the cave. The survival bag, the tarp, and the food are all here. If he can find a weapon, he could attack the hunter once he comes back—but when the Soldier flexes the muscles in his legs, they send bolts of pain upwards that leave him gasping for breath.

His head swims and he curls on his side near the hissing ration packet. It gives off more fumes than heat. Maybe he’s inhaling too much right now, because nausea builds in his stomach again. There’s static in his head. His skin prickles like there are ants crawling on him, and he rubs at his arms to drive away the sensation. 

In the corner of his eye, there’s the constant flicker of snow falling. The rock against his cheek is cold, cold, cold.

_Sergeant Barnes?_

_Bucky, grab my hand—!_

His body jerks. At first he thinks it’s another seizure, but then he’s being pulled upright.

“Hey! Come on, answer me!”

The hunter is crouched over him. When did he come back? There’s a pile of wood nearby but he must have lit a fire because it’s suddenly hot inside the cave. The number of ants on the Soldier’s skin has multiplied and there’s a sharp pain in his midsection that makes him want to curl up tight.

The hunter doesn’t let him. He manhandles the Soldier to a seated position, forces him to drink water. It comes back up quickly and he holds the Soldier upright through that, too, even gathers his hair in one fist to keep it away from the vomit.

It hurts. Everything hurts, but the kindness hurts most of all, because it’s a lie. The hunter’s eyes are concerned and troubled, and he has every intention of taking the Soldier back to the cold dark _drip drip drip_.

-o-

Once the worst of it passes, whatever _it_ is, the hunter tucks him inside the survival bag and sets about building a fire. The Soldier watches through slitted eyes as the hunter tears apart logs with his bare hands, digging through the outer layers of damp wood for the dry centers. The fire he builds is weak and fluttering; it casts strange shadows on the walls of the cave that makes the Soldier nauseous if he looks at them for too long.

Instead he watches the hunter as he critically examines the meal pouch, hissing when he burns his fingers. To his own surprise the Soldier feels his mouth turn upward into a smile. For all his enhancements and training, the hunter still gets impatient to eat.

Maybe he makes some kind of noise, because the hunter glances in his direction then gestures with the meal pouch. “Think you can keep this down?”

Honestly the Soldier doesn’t know for sure. The sensation of something crawling on his skin hasn’t gone away, but his stomach seems to have turned the corner from nausea to ravenous hunger. So after the hunter takes a few bites from the pouch and decides it palatable—or maybe just to demonstrate that it’s not poisoned or drugged—he holds it out.

They eat, passing the pouch back and forth between bites. The fire crackles and hisses as pitch escapes from the wood.

The hunter says, “I was injured in the line of duty. While I was on a mission, I fell off the side of a mountain and cracked my skull open. Afterwards I developed long-term memory issues, so that’s why I don’t remember my name. My handler keeps trying to teach me, but—it never sticks.”

The Soldier considers him, chewing. “Do you believe that?”

The hunter rocks to his feet and moves around the campfire. The Soldier tenses, the plates of his metal arm recalibrating.  

The hunter gives him a look. “Don’t try anything,” he says, before he drops to one knee next to the Soldier. Bowing his head, he runs a hand through his short-cropped blond hair. “Feel here.”

Blinking, the Soldier starts to reach out with his metal hand, then stops and switches to his flesh hand. He isn’t sure why: the difference in his nerve sensory capacity between them is negligible. As the ends of the hunter’s hair prickle his palm, however, he knows that he chose right.

A ridge of hardened bone and scar tissue runs along the right side of the hunter’s skull head, from his temple to just below the crown. Goosebumps rise on his skin as the Soldier touches it, running inquisitive fingers along the length of the closed wound.

“Feels like it hurt,” the Soldier comments. The fingers of his metal hand twitch with the repressed urge to grab the hunter’s collar and fling him into the fire—but he’s pretty sure he knows how that would go. He isn’t ready, yet. Still healing.

The hunter seems braced for an attack, too, but when it doesn’t come he leans back to kneel with his foot tucked underneath him. “Think something like that happened to you? And that’s why—”

He gestures, clearly meaning what had happened today, on the long walk here. The Soldier works his jaw, swallows. “Dunno. Maybe.”

“Has that happened to you before?”

The chair. Sparks of energy. His body, arching helplessly, rigid in the grip of a metal fist. And—and tubes. _Drip, drip, drip_ into him.

“They did that,” he grits out. His teeth throb. “HYDRA did that to me.”

The knowledge solidifies inside of him. He may not know who he is or where he came from, but there was something inside of him before this, some other version of himself that has been stolen, and HYDRA is the thief. 

When he blinks away the daze of realization, the hunter is staring into the fire, his brow furrowed. The Soldier has the strangest feeling that he’s seen this particular scene before—that he knows this expression. Maybe they’ve worked together, gone on missions together that neither one of them can now remember.

Then the hunter’s impressive jaw sets, and the Soldier’s heart sinks.

“You know who I saw on my way out of the base?” the hunter asks. He doesn’t wait for a reply: “Anye Mjoher. She wasn’t much, just a little kid. My brain the way it is, I don’t remember much—but I remember her. She worked in logistics. Red hair? Walked with a limp?”

The Soldier can guess what happened to her. He doesn’t remember specifics…he wasn’t exactly taking note of anyone’s hair color on his way out of the base.

“You killed her.” The hunter glares at him. “If what you’re saying is true, and you were—mistreated, somehow, by your handlers, then I can understand wanting to get free. But you killed a lot of innocent people in the process.”

“Innocent?” the Soldier rasps. “Is that what we’re calling it?”

“ _Yeah_ , we are. Maybe I don’t know the full story of what’s going on with you. You can be damn sure I’m gonna have some questions once we get back to base. But we have a responsibility, as enhanced individuals—”

“Enhanced by _who_?”

“—to help HYDRA keep the world from _destroying_ itself. Right now, out there, the Soviet Union and the United States are seconds away from freezing the world in a nuclear _holocaust_. None of their leaders can be trusted to act in the best interests of ordinary citizens, so we have to do it for them. Now, maybe you don’t care. Maybe you’re just some prisoner who volunteered for enhancement experiments rather than serve the sentence you deserved. But I care.”

The Soldier glares at him savagely. “Well, aren’t you just a regular Cap—”

The world flickers. When it rights itself again, the hunter is frowning at him. “What?”

The Soldier blinks and looks away. “Nothin’.”

The hunter narrows his eyes, but after no further explanation is forthcoming he presses his lips together and takes back the empty ration pouch, folding it up and tucking it into the same pocket with their other waste.

This task completed, he returns his skeptical gaze to the Soldier. “You gonna let me share that?”

The Soldier glances down at the survival bag still wrapped around his legs. With half his body inside it and the fire still flickering, he barely feels the cold. “Can I stop you?” he asks, lifting his gaze to the hunter’s again.

“Sure you can,” the hunter replies steadily.

They look at each other for a long moment in the firelight that plays in orange and red over their features. The Soldier finds himself looking for something else like the furrowed brow—some momentary expression that he could grasp and say, _I know this. I know this man_.

It doesn’t appear and yet he still finds himself shifting, making room in the survival bag for another body.

The hunter removes his gear, again placing it all outside of the Soldier’s reach; but then he goes further and removes his boots and his armored vest. The Soldier finds himself copying the gesture, reaching for buckles that he didn’t even know existed before this moment.

When he pulls the sleeve off his flesh arm, the hunter makes a noise of surprise. There’s an IV line dangling from the Soldier’s forearm. He joins the hunter in staring at it, trying to remember when someone put that in, and for what purpose. He hadn’t even realized it was there.

 _Drip drip drip_.

A touch brings him back. The hunter’s hand, on the delicate skin of his elbow. He waits until the Soldier looks up at him then shifts so that his fingers wrap around the IV line. Waits still for the Soldier to close his eyes in assent before carefully pulling it out. The Soldier barely feels the sting.

There’s a faint noise as the hunter tosses the IV deeper into the cave—the first time that he’s thrown something aside instead of tucking it into a pocket. Standing, he shucks his armor to the waist; underneath, he wears a gray sweater that looks surprisingly soft. It’s like seeing the underbelly of a shark.

The world is flickering again, or maybe that’s just the firelight. The Soldier fumbles out of his own reinforced gear, dreading any more surprises; but all he finds is a similar steel gray sweater, though his has only one sleeve. The other sleeve is neatly hemmed at the shoulder. He can feel the stitching underneath the fabric, and beneath that the network of scars that encircle his shoulder joint. That much, he remembers.

“Hey,” the hunter says in a low voice. “Come on, it’s getting cold.”

He maneuvers the Soldier into lying on his side, with their heads towards the fire, then breaks a heat stick and shoves it down near their feet. Again, the hunter lies down behind him, though this time they prop their heads on the Soldier’s discarded tac vest.

It’s not even fully dark outside. If he cranes his neck slightly the Soldier can still see out the mouth of the cave, where snow continues to fall in a gray twilight. His nose is cold and he wonders if the hunter would trust him enough to turn over, let the Soldier have a turn at keeping his face warm. The hunter’s nose is right against the back of his head, his breath smells like—

—spaghetti and meatballs—

The Soldier stares straight ahead. That’s what they’d eaten out of the pouch. He hadn’t even known what to call it, but he knows the smell. Seeping up through the floor. Italian family downstairs. The brothers called him a mick and he’d call them spics but the mamma gave him meatballs if he brought up an extra paper from his corner.

He was not a prisoner. This is not a prison sentence earned. He has a name; he had a mother of his own. He knows this. He _knows_.

But for how long?

“HYDRA did this to me,” he murmurs to the darkness. “Not just one bad handler. All of them. If you take me back, you’re killing me.”

The breath against his neck is too uneven for sleep, but the hunter doesn’t answer.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No animal death in this chapter! Next one.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for animal death (it's in self-defense), vomiting.

The Soldier dreams. He shouldn’t—standard protocol in the field is to wake every fifteen minutes to perform perimeter checks—but in the cave with his target pressed against his front and some degree of warmth flooding his limbs, he sinks into a deeper sleep.

His dreams are abstract, fragmented. There’s no narrative to them: he’ll see the base and anticipate standdown protocols, but then the base has a room with chairs and a man made of fire. The man laughs at him horribly, saying he’s won, and then disappears before the Soldier can lash out. There’s a little girl with red hair who tells him solemnly to wait, that he’ll know to run when he smells smoke. There’s a river and a train and a man crawling through trees in the snow, leaving a trail of blood. A woman seen through the scope of a sniper rifle, holding a grenade, her lips painted red. The red of Soviet uniforms as he cuts them down. The flash of a flag, snapping above him as he wears a different uniform and cuts down different men. Everything is red.

There’s a pressure on his arm that causes him to gradually shake off the layers of sleep. Either his target was obeying sleep protocol or he woke up faster, because he’s pinching the Soldier’s forearm. They both lie still, listening.

From the darkness: a deep snuffling noise, followed by the sound of something very large moving.

They’ve kept the fire sputtering all night, one of them periodically reaching out from their cocoon to feed it another stick. Now they both peer in its dim, flickering light toward the back of the cave. Something is moving there, coming closer.

The Soldier wriggles free of the survival bag and his target, registering a slight and unexplainable discomfort between his legs as he does so. It’s not a pain he’s accustomed to, but it’s mild enough that he feels free to ignore it, choosing instead to slide a fresh magazine into his sidearm and load a round in the chamber.

Perhaps drawn in by the sharp, mechanical sounds, the source of the noise that awoke them draws closer, lumbering into the light.

It’s a fucking _bear_.

A full-grown adult Kodiak bear, likely male from the size. On all fours, its shoulder reaches the Soldier’s waist. Upright, it will tower over them both.

“Oh shit,” the target blurts, scrambling against the cave wall to hike himself up. His right leg, the one the Soldier broke, gives out when he tries to stand.

He looks at the Soldier, his eyes wide. He is unarmed, mobility compromised. Even with the serum and super-strength, there’s little chance for him against a bear nearly five times his size. He’ll be mauled, ripped to shreds. _Lethal parameters authorized_ , though it wouldn’t even be _him_ behind the trigger.

There’s no moment in which the Soldier consciously _chooses_. He sees his target’s eyes and then he is pulling his sidearm and firing it at the bear.

In the enclosed space of the cave the gunshots are deafening, the flashes of muzzle fire blinding. The bear roars, furious, as bullets lodge in its shoulders and front legs. It tries to rear upright but the roof is too low, so instead it drops back down and uses that momentum to charge.

In the corner of his vision the Soldier sees his target flatten against the cave wall. Then he is fully preoccupied with backpedaling, reloading his sidearm as he goes. The bear follows, its head down and its powerful shoulders flexing as it runs at him.

Turning, the Soldier sprints for the mouth of the cave. If he gets pinned in close quarters, he’s dead, so once he’s sure the bear is giving chase he runs for open ground. It follows, a roar of noise behind him: claws scraping on stone, heaving breaths, the swipe of its coarse fur against the wall of the cave.

Emerging into the darkness of early morning, the Soldier immediately drops to his hip and slides five feet down the rocky incline onto flat ground. The bear pulls up, but the weight of its own body, the slippery ice, and its momentum send it hurtling after the Soldier, who somersaults to avoid being crushed by a thousand pounds of angry bear.

It appears momentarily winded by its landing, which buys him enough time to put some space between them and draw a bead on the bear’s head. These rounds hit their mark with more efficacy, further stunning the creature; but it does not go down, and now the Soldier is out of bullets. In the absence of his other gear—still inside the cave—he crouches low, preparing to fight it out and hoping that the animal is wounded enough to give up pursuit.

No luck. The bear roars again, this time successfully rising onto its hind legs. It stands taller than him by at least a meter. Too high for him to jump over and get behind. He’ll either have to break and run for it—leaving his target to fend for himself—or he’s going to have to fucking _fist-fight_ a fucking _bear_.

Just as the bear is visibly preparing itself to lunge, however, a flaming branch descends from above and strikes it squarely in the face. It rears back, almost losing its balance, and in the moment of its distraction the Soldier hears, “Hey!”

He looks up. His target is standing on one leg, braced against the cave opening; the second they make eye contact he pitches something at the Soldier’s head. It’s just a blur in the dark, but the Soldier catches it on reflex. A stun baton.

The Soldier spins it to lie flat against his forearm and activates the electro-shock circuit. It forms a beam of crackling energy, sparking white and blue in the pre-dawn light, and he puts that arm forward, using it like a shield. The bear doesn’t like that much, but either it’s hungry enough or angry enough that it comes at him anyway, roaring hard enough to shake the mountains. It’s a dark, hulking mass, but lean, too, like maybe it’s been missing a few meals and is willing to take its chances on the meal delivered to its doorstep.

The Soldier moves back, swiping left to right in the bear’s face and connecting with the stun baton. One of the bear’s paws slashes across his ribcage, nearly knocking him off his feet. The Soldier uses that momentum to cartwheel, kicking away a second attack.

When he rights himself, he’s moved to the bear’s side, to which he quickly applies the stun baton. It twitches its skin like a horse shaking off a fly and rounds on him, nearly swiping him backhanded across the face. Its claws miss him by centimeters.

There’s an odd, periodic whistling noise that the Soldier becomes aware of as he backs up. A blur of motion identifies the source: his target is pitching rocks from above, using the metal arm. It doesn’t seem to do much more harm than the stun baton, but the rain of projectiles buys the Soldier another few moments of distraction.

“Run!” his target shouts. “Find a fuckin’ _tree_ or something!”

Tactically, it makes sense. Without the rifle, neither one of them has the caliber of weapon to shoot the bear with any efficacy, unless they get a lucky shot to the eyes. Even if one of them wanted to try, the clips of ammunition are up in the cave and the empty gun is down here. However, while the Soldier may not know much about himself, he knows he’s not the type to run from a fight.

He pulls his knife. It’s a four-inch Ka-Bar, not the broadsword that he’d probably prefer for this task. The bear has turned fully away from him to focus on the target, who looks like he regrets getting involved and like he’s going to try getting up the side of the mountain one-legged. Taking a running start, the Soldier puts one foot on the bear’s hindquarters, vaults up into the air, and comes down with the Ka-Bar focused squarely on the back of its neck.

A direct stab to the spine would have paralyzed the ursine. Unfortunately, the Soldier’s blade lands several centimeters to the left of the spine.

The bear thrashes, trying to twist around to bite him. It comes close enough that spittle strikes the Soldier’s forehead. Gripping a handful of matted hair for purchase and grabbing on with his knees, he pulls the knife out and stabs it back in.

The bear roars again, but this time sounds more guttural, wounded rather than angry. It twists back and—on the strength of desperation—gets hold of one of his boots with its teeth.

The Soldier doesn’t really mean to do it; he only means to hold on and not get pulled under the bear and pinned. Flailing out, he grabs the side of the bear’s head even as it yanks him down.

There’s a loud cracking noise as the bear’s neck breaks. It convulses, twitches, and collapses. The Soldier just barely has the presence of mind to roll away.

The ground under him actually shudders as the bear thuds against it. He gets a knee under him and spins to face the beast, panting. It lies facedown, unmoving. The Soldier waits. He’s lost both the knife and the stun baton, but he can see the former still buried in the bear’s neck. If it moves, he’ll have to grab it fast and then—keep stabbing, probably.

But the bear doesn’t move and after a few moments the Soldier climbs to his feet, wincing. The left side of his tac vest has been shredded, blood welling from deep cuts. He digs a tooth out of the heel of his boot and tosses it aside.

He is still half-deaf from the gunshots earlier, but from nearby there’s a faint scrabble of falling rocks. Looking up, the Soldier finds his target standing on the overhang nearby, again using one of the skis as a crutch. He has a slightly incredulous look on his face as he gazes down at the Soldier, standing over the enormous, furry body of his defeated foe.

“So,” the Soldier says. “You ever skinned a bear?”

-o-

The wounds on his side prove much less serious than the Soldier first guessed; already he can feel the itch of healing flesh. Still, he disinfects the claw marks and wraps his ribs carefully. When asked, his target reports no injuries worse than a few bruises. The Soldier takes him at his word.

“You saved me,” his target points out as he watches the Soldier tend to his wounds. The Solder has stripped to the waist, his skin prickling in the cold. The lacerations are not deep but he still applies a few butterfly bandages to secure the more serious gouges.

After the Soldier makes no reply, his target shifts, subtly straightening and flexing his injured leg. “They must want me back alive pretty bad. I guess that makes sense—I’m an important investment.”

It sounds like those words came to him from someone else. Keeping his eyes on his hands, the Soldier says, “Every operative is important.” His target snorts but says nothing. “How long have you—when did you join HYDRA?”

This time when there’s no response, he looks up to find his target staring into the mid-distance, his lips slightly parted. He stays like that until the Soldier waves a hand in front of his face. Then he flinches backward, licking his lips and ducking his head. “I don’t think I did.”

The Soldier’s head hurts, a faint pulse that has been building since they woke up. His hands shake more than the cold can account for. He tries not to let his target see. He asks, “How do you know?”

The Soldier’s target studies him. He asks, “Why did you save me? Was that on orders?”

“No. Lethal parameters were authorized.”

“Why save me, then? Why not kill me in the first place?”

The Soldier pulls his shirt back on. “I’d rather take you alive.”

“What difference does that make to HYDRA?”

“It makes a difference to _me_ ,” the Soldier snaps, nettled into anger. “Killing in combat is one thing. Killing when it isn’t necessary…that’s just murder.”

“How do you know that?”

“What the hell do you mean, how do I know? I _know_.”

Pressing his mouth together, his target nods. “I know I didn’t join HYDRA.”

Caught, the Soldier looks away. He doesn’t remember his life before HYDRA. They tell him he was a nurse’s son who volunteered for the Russian Army out of patriotism. They never mention a father, sisters or brothers. Friends. They say he joined HYDRA because he saw the US and Russia marching towards nuclear annihilation and wanted to save the world from them both.

Parts of that had felt real—felt like it must be true. Enough that he had always overlooked the gaps or ascribed them to his head injury.

Now…now he looks again and wonders.

The hide of the bear proves much thicker than his own. The Soldier has to string up the body in a nearby tree and hack at its underbelly. When its innards finally spill out onto the snow, there’s a moment in which he _knows_ that he has done this to a living person, who had been gagged and was actively struggling against the knife even as his intestines tumbled out.

Spinning away, the Soldier vomits into the snow.

The image—a jungle, somewhere warm, the smell of gasoline, a woman crying—fades back into the world around him, like a glimpse of the sun superimposed on his eyelids. When was it? He couldn’t remember a mission like that. Why had he—? Christ, the man he’d gutted had still been _alive_ , and bound. He’d been unable to even fight back.

Despite his revulsion and horror, the Soldier groped after the fleeting memory, trying to recall what he’d been feeling at that moment. What could have driven him to do something like that? Was it under orders? Who would have ordered him to do that? Why would he have obeyed?

He realizes he’s panting and forces himself to slow down, spitting a few times to clear the last of the vomit from his mouth. When he finally lifts his head, his target is standing a few feet away, leaning on his makeshift crutch.

The Soldier braces for questions that he cannot answer, but none arrive. His target remains silent and after a moment the Soldier wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and turns back to the bear carcass.

Eventually he winds up with a few bloody handfuls of meat, which they take back into the cave to cook over the fire on sticks. Or, at least, the target cooks several pieces. The Soldier’s stomach remains tight as he compulsively replays the fragment of memory. He can’t picture the man’s face—had he been an enemy soldier? A prisoner? Every time he glances at the slivers of meat—piled on a piece of canvas next to the fire—he feels bile rise in his throat again.

Lurching to his feet, he lifts the pack onto his shoulders. The target, who’s in the middle of tearing a piece of bear meat off his spit with his teeth, looks up sharply.

“I’m going to high ground,” the Soldier grits out. “Have a look around.”

The mouthful of meat detaches. Part of it hangs from the target’s lips. He chews the half that’s between his teeth, still silently watching the Soldier.

Turning, the Soldier marches out of the cave. He doesn’t tell his target not to run. With the food, fire, and shelter here, that seems unlikely, despite the target’s multiple assurances that he prefers death to being taken back to base.

Outside, the sky has cleared somewhat. The Soldier carefully does not look down at the bear carcass hanging from the tree; instead he turns his face towards the promontory peak and begins to climb. It’s slippery and treacherous, the deep gouges across his ribs pull against their bandages, and at all points he’s wary of starting an avalanche that might block the cave’s entrance, trapping his target inside.

Once or twice, he glances back, half-expecting to see the distant figure of his target bolting into the trees. But he never does. Either the target is still in the cave or he’s already slipped away while the Soldier wasn’t looking.

When the snow-covered rock finally levels off into an open space, the Soldier turns toward the view. It’s a stunning sight: he can see all the way across the forest to the open field they crossed to reach the forest, and the ridge beyond.

Distantly, past the ridge, far to the west and in the approximate direction of the base, something smudges the horizon. It’s darker than the fluffy clouds overhead and seems to be rising from the ground. The Soldier can’t be certain, but he’s almost certain that it’s smoke.

He stands there studying the amount and quality of the smoke before he turns away, looking south and east. North isn’t an option: the cold and dark would only worsen. To the east, this promontory is met by craggy mountain peaks that effectively end any possibility of retreat. The forest stretches away to the south, interspersed with smaller hills. If he squints, the Soldier can make out the shine of something that might be a large water mass on the horizon.

(Why does he not know where they are? How could he have been stationed at a base without even knowing what continent the base is on?)

Lifting a hand, he runs his fingers over the scar on the side of his head. Underneath the knotted skin, the bone twists in ridges as jagged and dark as the rock he stands on. _Damage to the frontal and right parietal lobe, impacting impulse control and both long-term and short-term memory storage._ He does not remember his own name, but he remembers the diagnosis. How can he recall one thing and not the other?

Looking down, he thinks of falling. Twisting through the air, his arm outstretched. It’s not a memory, but it’s the impression of one: like a body that falls into a drift then is lifted away and leaves only its outline imprinted in the snow.

There should be a memory attached to the thought of falling. Reaching for something. But there isn’t.

Instead he remembers the bloody disemboweling. The stench of blood and shit. The Soldier has killed more people than he remembers (should he remember?) but he does it when _necessary_ , on a battlefield. He would have disobeyed an order to kill a prisoner in such a way, regardless of their affiliation or crime.

Nothing, not even saving the world, justifies something like that. He knows this, deep in his bones, deeper than any memory or memory of memory. He knows, even without a name, what kind of man he is.

But he did it.

He would not have done something like that willingly, which means that…that something or someone else compelled him to do so. Mind control of some kind, maybe telepathy. He considers the possibilities as the sun crawls across the sky.

When he finally climbs back down to the cave, his target is sitting next to the embers of their fire with his right leg stretched out in front of him. He has both heels of his palms planted in the thick muscles of his thighs and appears to be pressing down with a grimace.

The Soldier wants to grip him by the throat and shake him, wants to scream, _What did you do to me?_ Something inside of him has shifted, and the fault line originates with the man sitting next to the fire.

“What are you doing?” he asks instead.

“Think the bone didn’t set right,” his target replies through gritted teeth. “It keeps grinding.”

That feeling, the Soldier knows all too well: under the influence of the serum, muscles heal faster than bone, and within an otherwise-functional limb, two bone fragments can grind together endlessly, damaging and healing themselves in turns. This could be to the Soldier’s advantage. Thus far he has overpowered his target easily, but with all the advantages of a support crew, equipment, and better physical condition. If the target is allowed to fully heal then they will very nearly be on a level playing field, and the Soldier honestly isn’t sure who would prevail if they fight again.

“You need help?” he asks.

It’s easy enough to predict how the target will react: a silent stare, his head ducked low and his gaze unnervingly steady. The Soldier thinks of wild foxes that he’s seen on missions, or big cats crouched in trees—creatures with sharp teeth that nonetheless survive primarily through caution.

“Sure,” his target says, releasing the pressure on his leg.

Shucking the rucksack, the Soldier kneels near his target’s foot and takes him by the ankle. “You press down, see if it’ll reset.”

After a long moment of stillness his target shifts forward again, gripping the meat of his thigh as the Soldier carefully provides traction. HYDRA trained the Soldier in all the ways of breaking rather than remaking a human body, but he has watched the medics tend to him after every mission. Watching his target now, it’s obvious that he learned the same clumsy way.

Basic first aid never covered this. Whatever major injuries they endured in the field were tended to once they returned to base—and now the Soldier has to wonder if that was deliberate.

His target grimaces. “Fuck. It’s stuck. I can’t get it to—”

“Want me to try?”

Again, that steady, unnerving stare. The Soldier can’t blame him: less than two days ago, the Soldier broke this very leg.

Eventually, though, he sits back. The Soldier edges closer, putting his bent knee near his target’s and the heel of his hand on the target’s thigh, right where the muscle had knotted up.

Reaching back to take the target’s ankle, he asks, “You ready, B—?”

He cuts off. It’s as if his mind has staggered to the edge of a cliff and leapt over the side. He is in freefall, no idea which way is up or down, and though the lack of stability is terrifying he fears the landing more.

The target looks up at him. If he had any fear of the pain, he doesn’t show it: his face is as stoic as ever. The plates in his arm recalibrate, though, the only outward betrayal of his inner stress. As he takes in the Soldier’s expression, whatever he sees there makes the plates shift faster.

It doesn’t feel as though the Soldier’s hands are his own. They exist at the end of a long tunnel through which he is falling. He feels like he could reach out and, in attempting to pick up a feather, instead punch through a wall by accident; and yet he slowly, slowly lifts his fingers to touch his target’s brown hair. His target flinches more at that gesture than at the threat of having his femur re-set.

“Bucky.” The Soldier’s lips are numb. His voice does not sound like his own. “Bucky.”

His target stares. “What the fuck does ‘Bucky’ mean?”

The Soldier staggers to his feet. His legs barely hold him. He is falling, twisting through space. He cannot find a handhold. Turning away, he lurches toward the mouth of the cave and the weak gray light beyond.

Behind him, the wounded man calls, “Steve? Steve!”

Then, a terrified shriek: “ _Why did I just call you Steve?_ ”

-o-

Sometime later, the Soldier stirs. He is leaning, crouched like an animal, against a tree trunk not far from the cave’s entrance. Inside, firelight still flickers on the cave walls, but from out here he can’t see the flames, or his target.

Bucky. His target’s name is Bucky.

The carcass of the bear hangs in a tree nearby. Its blood on the snow has cooled and turned black, but the open wounds still steam in the cold air.

A shudder wracks him, but then he tightens his resolve, and his jaw. He is still in freefall but he has achieved something like a terminal velocity of the mind: the ground awaits, but for now he is weightless. Nothing, he fears, is what he thought it was, but all he can do is try to survive their current predicament.

Which might prove to be enough of a challenge on its own, considering that he doesn’t know where his sidearm has gone.

He knows he had it in the cave, but it’s not in the holster at his hip and he doesn’t see it lying in the snow between here and the cave. He knows he had it before he said Bucky’s name, but he doesn’t know what happened to it afterwards.

When he edges back into the cave, however, Bucky doesn’t immediately shoot him. He’s sitting beside the fire with his legs straight out in front of him.

“They sent me on a mission,” Bucky says without looking up. He stares at the fire, and its light glimmers in his pale eyes. The plates in his arm shift and recalibrate. “Lethal parameters. No witnesses. The scientist—he called me a name.”

“Bucky,” the Soldier mumbles. He feels like he’s forgotten every other word in any language he’s ever spoken.

“No. He called me ‘Sergeant Barnes.’” The target looks up at Steve. “I still killed him, and her, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the name.”

The Soldier doesn’t have a metal arm, so he doesn’t know how much of his inner turmoil shows. Clenching his jaw again, he says, “Best thing you can do right now is put it out of your mind and focus on getting through this.”

He moves toward his pack, but Bucky is already asking, “And then what?”

Ignoring him, the Soldier begins re-sorting his supplies. With the bear meat, they have enough provisions to last them at least a week. If he butchers it and removes a few non-vital items from his rucksack he’ll be able to carry enough to feed them for…two days, he’d guess. He’ll need to find something to wrap up the meat so that blood doesn’t get all over his other equipment. Maybe—maybe Bucky will help carry it.

As he ponders their options, Bucky persists. “Have you noticed, we’re speaking English right now? I didn’t think about it until I was sitting here, and I thought, all my handlers speak Russian. I don’t know what kind of name Bucky is but Barnes sounds English, or American. And _Steve_ —”

“Don’t—don’t say that.”

“—Steve definitely sounds American. Why did you start speaking English to me, when I woke up?”

“I don’t _know_.” The Soldier flings down a heat stick.

Across the fire, light flickers on Bucky’s face. It feels like between one twist of flame and the next, he might disappear or transform into something else. “I’m not going back, Steve.”

He’s got the gun in his lap, finger resting straight next to the trigger. Steve looks at it then down at the contents of the pack spread out in front of him. The shape of the fall is forming around him, jagged rocks below. For a wild moment he desperately wants to call his handler, to be taken back in for reprogramming—a bungee cord lifting him back to everything he has thought to be true for the last—however long he’s believed what HYDRA told him.  

Except—except.

“Bucky Barnes,” he says, staring at his dirty fingers. There’s blood under each of his nails, in the creases of his knuckles. “James Buchanan Barnes.”

It feels so natural to say, his lips and tongue and larynx moving together as easy as firing a rifle. He didn’t know the words before today, before this very moment, but they rise out of him like they were always waiting inside.

When he looks again, Bucky’s eyes are bright and alive. “You know me,” he whispers, barely audible in the dark, dripping cave.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: canon-typical amnesia issues, canon-typical violence, way too much snow, animal death in I think chapter 2? They fight a bear. No, really.


End file.
